Bio
​Jon Field was born in Manchester, England in 1963, and was educated at Lancaster University, receiving his doctorate in 1998. After twenty years working in the United States, he now lives in Ipswich, England.
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His work is the subject of a feature article in Art Papers: “Elegiac Documents: The Presidents’ Favorite Paintings” and was awarded ‘Best in Show’ for A Charge to Keep in Text + Texture, juried by internationally respected curator Dan Cameron. More recently, his work has been exhibited at AIR Galley, Manchester, England, and the Dora Maar House, Menerbes, France. It has been the subject of an interview with Chief Editor Steve Knudsen in ArtPulse magazine, the subject of a feature article at floromancy.org, and included in the current edition of drainmag.com, journal of contemporary art and culture.
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Why does contemporary art matter?
In a world saturated with AI, where tools like ChatGPT and Midjourney grab headlines, the landscape of cultural production has taken on what Byung-Chul Han terms "smoothness." According to Han, this smooth culture serves to speed up the flow of information, communication, and capital.
My aim is to push back against this smoothness, whether the work be satirical (Day of the Locust), elegiac (The Painted Closet), or collaborative (The Desiring Machine).
The Painted Closet
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In the early seventeenth century, Lady Anne Drury of Suffolk painted a collection of small, allegorical pictures, which she housed in a specially designed closet. These painted panels served as objects of meditation. This series re-works Lady Anne’s project. Following her lead, I adopted the practice of recycling and repurposing the work of previous artists. Also like her, I worked in solitude (in both projects, the term ‘closet’ alludes to personal, secret stuff).
Despite these similarities, the two closets are very different: Instead of clarity, ambiguity. Instead of transcendence, immanence. And instead of Puritanical certainty, twenty-first century doubt.
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Day of the Locust
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The term 'History Painting' refers to any picture with a high-minded or heroic narrative, as illustrated by the exemplary deeds of its figures. The Day of the Locust series rework images taken from art history and the mass media. Made of dressmaker pins that puncture large sheets of black velvet, there is something excessive about these pictures: the grand scale, the innumerable pins, the evident slowness of production. Also something wrong: the characters are never what they seem, their heroism questionable.
These pictures are history paintings for the early twenty-first century.
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The Desiring Machine
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As Artist in Residence (2022) at Sulfur Studios in Savannah, USA, I revisited a seminal Dada work. Kurt Schwitters' Merzbau (or ‘Desiring Machine’) was a continually changing, immersive environment. .In early 2022, the local community, including schoolchildren, shopkeepers, and businesspeople, collaborated for a month to construct an ever-changing installation. The raw materials were provided by the same people, and their constant positioning and re-positioning generated an ever-evolving visual conversation.